As a kid and even later on as a adult, I always thought a I had a higher dosage than most of the "insecure/I think everyone is looking at me" factor. Like, if the the color green in an x-ray of my body somehow indicated the levels of how insecure I felt at that moment, I could easily pass as a stem of broccoli - with hoop earrings.

I could blame it on a lot of things - my own hangs ups, my upbringing, or maybe just the fact that I had a crooked haircut in elementary school. Or even that I had Dad's bushy eyebrows as a kid (they looked like caterpillars that never moved on to butterfly class) instead of neat little pigtails and the more girly features of my mother. As a result of all of this, the tendency to want to blend into the crowd and hide instead of pulling away from the crowd to stand out was a force present in most of my growing up.

It took a lot to grow out of that place of feeling like I wasn't enough. Though I still have those slightly scary moments when I wonder about how straight my bangs are and if new people I meet actually like me for who I am, I am so grateful that it's not what it used to be. Now in my life there's more (much more) laughing off the weirdness of crooked haircuts instead of hiding from it. There's now more time celebrating unique factors of who I became and what makes me different from the rest of the crowd. And above all, I'm so grateful I get to express that in my photography. To help make a person feel over- the-top-fantabulous in their photos, helping them to see that the things they worried about as a kid in how they looked are exactly what make them unique and absolutely worth showing off to the rest of the world.